Killarney, haunt of Poets & Writers

literature and travel writing who spread the fame of the Killarney Valley through the written word.

Arthur Young, Dorothea Herbert, Mr & Mrs Hall, WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Brendan Behan are but a sample.

English poets of past centuries seem a universe away from Killarney when encountered in school text books. Imagine then the initial surprise of discovering that Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘The Splendour Falls’ was inspired by our own Ross Castle and Lough Léin. There would have been no astonishment back in the 1700s and 1800s when Killarney natives were literally ‘tripping over’ visiting Romantic poets of the stature of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1813), William Wordsworth (1829) and Tennyson (1848).